Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(27)

What started out as a cold became bronchitis and finally pneumonia. With that came the dilemma. We didn't have insurance, and we didn't have a mother willing to take Nik to the doctor. If you show up at the doctor sick as a dog and without a parent, they notice. They notice enough to get Social Services involved. Maybe foster care would've been better than what we had. It couldn't have been much worse, but there were no guarantees they wouldn't split us up. Niko was old enough to know that and he made sure I knew it too.

We weren't going to be split up. Period.

But when you're seven and the brother who's your whole damn world is too sick to get out of bed, you have to do something. Anything. I was too young for kidnapping, but there were other things I could do. We lived in a trailer park then and we had a few elderly neighbors. Old people had medicine, lots of it. But those same old people hated to leave their trailers. Hated it like poison. I'd wanted Nik to tell me what to do, but he was so desperately sick and even more stubborn. He didn't want me doing anything stupid. At seven years old, that was about all I could do.

Old people make an exception about leaving their homes when there's a fire. I'd torched an empty trailer two rows over with Sophia's lighter and a half-empty bottle of Old Crow. When everyone had run or hobbled over to watch the bonfire, I'd raided medicine cabinets. I wouldn't have known an antibiotic from blood pressure medicine, so I'd taken it all. Shoved bottle after bottle in my backpack, and after hitting four trailers, I'd run home to pour them in Niko's lap. They had cascaded down onto the blanket, bright and shining plastic reams of them.

"Which one?" I'd demanded desperately. "Which me?"

It had worked out then. I didn't have faith that the same would hold true now.

I made a grab for his arm, using my right hand this time. Between the drugs and the fever, it still wasn't much of an attempt. I missed. Promise didn't. She'd entered the room as quietly as she entered all rooms. Laying a hand on his arm, she slid it down to curl around his own hand. "I've brought assistance." She released Niko to move closer and rest a hand on the blankets over my leg. "She's not a doctor, but she can help." Glancing over her shoulder, she called, "Delilah?"

She appeared in the doorway. Flay's sister. I could see the resemblance instantly, although they were more different than alike. She was of better breeding, which would make her Flay's half sister. Flay could barely manage a half-human form. He was plainly a werewolf for anyone who had the eyes and the intelligence to look. With Delilah you would never know. She also had a hint of Asian features in her almond-shaped amber eyes. Where Flay had albino white hair, hers was silver-blond, very nearly as pale. It was pulled into a high ponytail at the crown of her head and hung ruler straight to midback. A stylized necklace was tattooed choker-style around her neck. The jewels set in Celtic swirls were eyes, wolf, all of them. Gold, red, green, brown, pumpkin orange…and the softer amber of her own eyes. An unbelievably talented artist had imbued them with emotion. Some were full of laughter, some curiosity, some hunger, all of them astonishingly real.

She wore low-slung black jeans, a matching jacket, and a snug amber-colored shirt. Both jacket and shirt were cropped to reveal a good seven or eight inches of midriff, which was as decorated as her neck. But where the one decoration had been made of ink, the ones on her stomach were composed of scar tissue. Multiple slashes, thick and cruel. As a wolf she'd be as proud of those as she was of her tattoo, maybe more so. Ink was ink, but scars were badges of survival. They said, "I'm here. I'm alive. And I buried the son of a bitch who did this."

"You can help? How?" Niko said with rigid control.

Fine blond eyebrows quirked and she raised a hand, palm to her mouth, to bite the heel of it hard. Then she licked the wound and turned the hand toward us. The bite was healing already. The blood had stopped flowing and the flesh was knitting slowly.

"Of course," Goodfellow said. "Werewolves have a natural propensity for healing, but their saliva speeds the process."

Delilah gave a single regal nod, then moved over to me and removed my bandage. Light flared behind her eyes, turning amber to brilliant copper. "Ahhh." She sounded impressed. When a wound impresses a wolf, it doesn't bode well for the guy sporting it.

For the first time I looked. Impressive was one word for it. Horrific was another. A hunk of flesh nearly as round as a child's fist was gone from my upper chest, just…gone. Left behind was a ragged red crater deep enough that I could imagine I could see the shine of muscle. "You were right." I swallowed, looked up at Niko, and gave him a crooked smile. "You get to be the pretty one now."

"News flash, little brother, I always have been," he retorted as he rested his hand on my shoulder to squeeze lightly.

From Delilah's snort, we were both fooling ourselves. In that moment I could see the impatient Flay in her clearly. Climbing onto the bed, she straddled my thighs and stripped off her jacket. "Go," she ordered to the room in general. "Now." It was more of Flay. I'd been wrong about Delilah; she wasn't what the old-school wolves considered pure breeding after all.

The community was divided among the wolves who cherished the old ways…pure human to pure wolf and back again, and the ones who thought the more wolf you were, the better. And they meant all wolf all the time with no taint of human. Those were the ones who bred for the recessive qualities. Flay and Delilah had come from a pack who had embraced that.